Ever since I started making money by marketing online, I’ve always seen the world in a different perspective. For one, I tend to read a lot more advertisements from everyday life, trying to understand the marketing motive behind the ads.

I am also interested in how local and offline companies market and advertise themselves, and what they do differently from online companies.

Oftentimes, there are some simple yet great methods that offline marketers do that you can apply online. In the video below, I give 3 very simple real-life examples of good marketing and advertising techniques that I found in my mailbox.

Sorry for the low volume in the video – you may want to crank your volume up:

(Note: You may need to visit the post directly at TylerCruz.com if you’re reading this via e-mail or RSS in order to see the video above.)

As mentioned in the video, the name of the two guys that sent me the letter are Mathew Carpenter and Dan Walker, and their website is SofaMoolah.com.

It appears as though they haven’t quite launched their site yet, but you can sign up to their mailing list to become notified of when it does.

As taken from their website:

“Sofa Moolah is a website devoted to teaching you how to make money online.

Run by 18 year old Mathew Carpenter and 20 year old Dan Walker, they bring you articles, resources, interviews and real life case studies that will show you exactly how to start your journey into making moolah from the comfort of your sofa.”

As I mention in the video, I haven’t read their eBook, but anyone who takes the time to physically send a letter to try to get noticed is okay in my book.

I admire you for using the magazine and the “snail mails” as your object lesson. I totally agree with you 100% and know that it does give you the advantage of gaining trust instantly when you apply one of those principles to your clients.

Pretty stupid for them to start sending out physical mail for a site that is not even launched. Majority of people are not going to want to sign up for another “newsletter”. It would have been better if they waited to mail until their site was launched so people can see the value they provide.

No value provided at a “Under Construction” page means that very few people will actually subscribe to their newsletter.

Anyway, thanks for your advice but we’re doing pretty well on subscriptions and have quite a steady rate of people signing up every day.

I was going to head over to your site to see if you had any articles about this kind of stuff I could read, but it appears you don’t have one. Although oddly I did find your gravatar on this page, weird!

What I still find talking to pretty much every single business owner out there is that they have no clue how to do proper online marketing.

For example, I see businesses spending tens of thousands of dollars on outdated offline marketing, but they don’t even know you can do PPC ads on Google with Geo-Targeting.

Or I see companies who spend $5,000 on a mail-out and they have a website that looks like it cost them $5 to make.

One thing I noticed today on TV was three different commercials for TV/Telephone/Internet with different packages and different 1-800 #’s but I am pretty sure they were for the same company.

Meaning, I think they were doing split-testing on TV! They had one commercial that focused on Internet and then had the cable/telephone thrown in, then another one that focused on the cable and had internet/telephone thrown in, and a third one selling the whole bundle.

It looked like three different companies, but the individual services were provided by the same companies, so I think it was a split test. Either that or some kind of affiliate deal where three different companies are re-selling the services of another.

Either way, I think the gap between Internet / TV is starting to fade. Lots of TV style ads are showing up on the net, and I’m starting to see Internet style strategies showing up on TV.

Yes Geo-targeted PPC ads, and google places are all cool…but they have a serious inherent weakness for local business marketing.

Those ads will only capture prospects who have finally decided that they need to take action and start looking. This is a microfraction of all possible prospects…you know,…the rest of the folks who are still ignorant to the fact that their life would be much easier with [insert service/product here] …yeah…you get nowhere near these people.

The local businesses adding consistent direct mail to their marketing are going to capture the local market share of business at a much faster pace, and a shorter amount of time then the guys who are relying mainly on their website stuff. or sitting in the yellow pages.

Direct mail packs some serious power on its own ..but combined with online mechanisms…your marketing effectiveness becomes a real obstacles for competitors.

My negative comment was removed by “Tyler Cruz”. You need to respond and prove yourself dude, not just delete a comment cos you don’t want people to see it. The video made no sense to me!! If you’ve put the comments section only for the positive comments, please mention it within a bracket or with a star at the bottom. This is being truly unprofessional!!